After months of bad press, here at last was an act of genuine humanitarianism by U.S. troops in Iraq that could have been trumpeted to the skies: a unit of National Guard troops -- part-time citizen-soldiers from Oregon -- rescuing a group of prisoners from sadistic torture by the security forces of the "sovereign" Iraqi government. Yet the incident was buried by U.S. brass, who repudiated their own soldiers -- and backed the Iraqi torturers.
It happened on June 29 -- the first full day of Iraqi "sovereignty" -- when a guardsman on routine patrol in an observation tower near a Baghdad prison saw Iraqi guards beating bound and blindfolded prisoners with metal rods, The Oregonian reported this week. The soldier called in the atrocity, and men from his unit were ordered into the prison. There they found dozens of prisoners -- including children -- bloodied, bruised, shot, starving, crammed into concrete pens, lying in their own filth. Torture implements were scattered through the compound, the paper said: "rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals."
The Guard troops -- many of whom said they'd been shamed by the American atrocities at Abu Ghraib -- disarmed the Iraqi security men and began giving first aid, water and food to the prisoners. They questioned the mysterious Iraqi civilian in charge -- an "obese man" in swank mufti. He told them there had been no torture at all -- and anyway, these prisoners were just street scum: "thieves, users of marijuana and other types of bad people," according to the written account of the incident provided by eyewitness Captain Jarrell Southall and corroborated by the other soldiers.
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/08/13/120.htmlSame old same old. John Negroponte back in the saddle again. What would one expect.
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